Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
How a church in Chicago’s South Side is empowering people through work
How a church in Chicago’s South Side is empowering people through work
Apr 26, 2025 12:39 AM

After purchasing an abandoned, dilapidated pool hall in Chicago’s South Side, Living Hope Church began massive renovations, engaging a range of help, including church members, volunteer construction workers, generous donations, and random passersby.

Yes, random passersby.

As Pastor Brad Beier explains in Essays for the Common Good, neighborhood residents would often stop by the project looking for money or some kind of material assistance. There were also a series of consecutive break-ins and burglaries, during which expensive tools and lighting fixtures were stolen.

Recognizing that the Woodlawn neighborhood has a 23% unemployment rate and that 41% of children are growing up in poverty, the church decided to grant new passersby with opportunities for employment. In the course of the four-year construction project, more than 50 people were hired off the street to receive a paycheck and learn new skills.

“Our primary way of trying to help without hurting those in need was to invite anyone who came looking for help to learn new skills or to put their existing experience to work on this old building,” writes Beier. “…Along the way, we realized pleting a day’s work together seemed to release a shared, God-instilled purpose and created a natural context for forming relationships.”

The result was a new web of life-giving relationships across munity, prompting Beier to partner with an economics student in the congregation to found Hope Works, munity development ministry” that “provides an individualized delivery model to address each person’s unique circumstances, especially for the person struggling to enter the job market at the lowest level.”

The organization has been running for over two years, providing resources and support to hundreds of unemployed neighbors and helping 74 people find jobs. As Beier explains:

The mission of Hope Works is to empower our neighbors to e catalysts of and participants in a flourishing South Side munity….Every day our story continues, our partnerships expand, and our impact grows for mon good and the glory of God…

Hope Works was built on the premise that jobs are critical to healthy families and a munity. And, of course, work is good for the soul, because we were created by God to work. When a family has a steady e through God-honoring work, the blessings positively impact their health, their children’s education, and the family’s overall peace. And when families have shalom (God’s perfect peace), it permeates a neighborhood’s ecosystem.

Many are quick to write off the enterprise and contributions of those in munities like Woodlawn, turning instead to top-down solutions or materialistic fixes from governments or powerful businesses. Instead, Living Hope Church is tapping into the bottom-up sources of abundance that God has already placed there — recognizing the human capital in all of us and setting people on the course of creative servicethat God designed.

Image: David Wilson, 200400405 16 CTA South Side (CC BY 2.0)

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Italy’s Tax Man Takes Aim at the Vatican
Kishore Jayabalan, the Acton Institute’s Rome office director, was interviewed by the Zenit news agency in an article titled, “Is Taxing the Church a Real Solution for Italy?” In the article, Jayabalan discusses the history of the Italian state and its imposition of property taxes on the Roman Catholic Church’s land holdings, residences and non-profit businesses. Sometimes in the past, particularly under Napoleonic rule and before the Lateran Pacts, the institution of property tax was often a subject of state...
Integral Human Development
The Journal of Markets & Morality is planning a theme issue for the Spring of 2013: “Integral Human Development,” i.e. the synthesis of human freedom and responsibility necessary for the material and spiritual enrichment of human life. According to Pope Benedict XVI, Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility. (Caritas in Veritate 17) There is a delicate balance between the material and the...
Constitutional Cases and the Four Cardinal Virtues
Should virtue be a consideration in judicial decisionmaking? Indiana Law Professor R. George Wright makes an intriguing argument for why the four cardinal virtues could be useful in interpreting constitutional cases: Judges typically decide constitutional cases by referring to one or more legal precedents, rules, tests, principles, doctrines, or policies. This Article mends supplementing this standard approach with fully legitimate and appropriate attention to what many cultures have long recognized as the four basic cardinal virtues of practical wisdom or...
Let’s Change Hearts and Minds (and Laws, Too)
Few clichés are so widespread within the evangelical subculture, says Matthew Lee Anderson, as the notion that our witness must be one of “changing hearts and minds.” In careful hands, the idea is at best ambiguous. At worst it reinforces the sort of interior-oriented individualism that allows for and perpetuates a blissful naivete about how institutions and structures shape our dispositions and thoughts. In less than careful hands, the phrase drives a wedge between law and culture by attempting to...
Lord Acton and the Power of the Historian
Looking through my back stacks of periodicals the other day I ran across a review in Books & Culture by David Bebbington, “Macaulay in the Dock,” of a recent biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay. The essay takes its point of departure in Lord Acton’s characterization of Macaulay as “one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious.” As Bebbington writes, “Acton, a towering intellectual of the later 19th century, was at...
Obamacare’s Religious Rubes
The White House has a plan to mobilize prayer vigils in front of the Supreme Court in defense of Obamacare. It was reported that the administration met with leaders at non-profit organizations and religious officials who support the new health care law. The court takes up the constitutional test of the health care mandate in a couple of weeks. The mandate has now been challenged in 26 states. Cue the same stale big government religious prophets who confuse statism and...
Is Work a Curse?
Is work a curse, a result of mankind’s fall from grace? Not according to the Book of Genesis. As Hugh Whelchel, Executive Director of the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, explains, what Adam was called to do in the garden is what we are still called to do in our work today: Humanity was created by God to cultivate and keep God’s creation, which included developing it and protecting it. You see, we were created to be stewards of...
How to Love Liberty More Than a Libertarian Economist
I have a deep and abiding love for liberty—which is why I find myself so often in disagreement with libertarians. Libertarians love liberty too, of course, but they tend to love liberty a bit differently. I love liberty in an earthy, elemental way. I love liberty because I need it—like I need air and food—for human flourishing. In contrast, the libertarians I’ve encountered tend to love liberty primarily as an abstraction. Indeed, the most ideologically consistent libertarians I know seem...
How to Steal a Bike in New York City
Edmund Burke didn’t really say it, but it still rings true: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. In a test of this maxim, filmmaker Casey Neistat tries to steal his own bike in several locations around New York City and finds that most people do nothing about it—even when it’s done right in front of a police station. I recently spent a couple of days conducting a bike theft experiment, which...
Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Threat to Freedom
Over at the Liberty Law Blog, there is an excellent post titled “Ronald Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Dialogue of Liberty” by Alan Snyder. Snyder delves into the influence Chambers had on Reagan and how their worldviews differed as well. Many conservatives and scholars felt Chambers’ prediction that the West was on the losing side of history in the battle against Marxism collapsed after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. For many, the ideas of Chambers...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved